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Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...)
Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)
Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from…
If it's the laws that are bad, why are so many congressmen surprised at the scope of the NSA's actions?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting... There are 535 high-profile Americans the NSA could check, many of whom have fascinating porn-search histories and radical (often anti-porn) public agendas.
I believe that the number of politicians being extorted by various secret services based on such information to act/vote in a particular way (in the US and abroad) to be much higher. In particular, many politicians in the EU seem to be aligned with US policies (those unpopular in the EU) a bit too much. They've probably got a lot to hide..
I don't know why everyone is paranoid about unseen location data being collected. They often blame proprietary software like iOS/Android collect location data and send Apple/Google servers. That sort of transfer would be evident by tracing traffic and there are tons of reverse engineers out there intentionally keeping an eye on transferred packages that might contain sensitive private data. That would be a huge break…
It is evident: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/
Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice. I was looking for that yesterday for the Google Location history discussion. Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."
In case you don't know German: "Orpnhfr bs guvf fbhepr pbqr, V'z abg tbvat gb urnira." (ROT13 for fellow non-native German speakers who want to think about the meaning for a moment.)
Setting aside morality for a moment, that's a pretty cool little system there. What havoc would be wrought if such a system were public? Heh, the mind reels.
I would think a system like that being public would cause a great deal of interpersonal problems until ways to circumvent the data collection were found (even if it meant tearing GPS receivers out of mobile phones). I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants were asked not to lie for the duration of the exp…
Even if you were to build your own cell phone or dig out an old brickphone without this capability (thanks to the FCC's efforts, basically no cell phone made after 2005 is without it), you can still be triangulated by the network with fair accuracy.
At this point, The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play.
This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out using the data shown? The article uses maps of Peoria, IL, so let's assume we're dealing with Peoria. There appear to be roughly 115K people between 18-64 in its metro area ( http://www.wolframalp…
Let's say you bring corruption charges to light, or advocate for something people in power don't like, or even just cut off someone's angry nephew in traffic.
In a country with a rule of law, that's okay --- you're safe. You can't just be arbitrarily punished.
But with this? No problem. They just tell the NSA to flag you, and as soon as you do _anything_, they'll get you. Better still if the data's retroactive --- if they can track everyone, and figure out that three years ago you caught a fish and transported it across state lines or whatever.
If you have a legal system that classes a majority of people as technically a criminal, and the capacity to selectively enforce that, then congratulations, you've got despotism.
It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture. From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this. I kno…
One day, we'll all be able to pore over our anyone's emails from the last 10 years from an NSA data leak posted on Piratebay. Employers, insurance companies, and ex/potential lovers will have a great time with that.